Böcker av Werner Herzog

A poetic meditation on life and death, by one of the most renowned and respected film-makers and intellectuals of our time. It is a remarkable narrative - part pilgrimage, part meditation, and a confrontation between a great German Romantic imagination and the contemporary world.

Werner Herzog has produced, written, and directed more than seventy films, including Nosferatu the Vampyre; Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Fitzcarraldo; and Grizzly Man. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and now lives in Los Angeles, California. His books Of Walking in Ice and Scenarios I and II are also published by Minnesota. ¿ Krishna Winston is Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature at Wesleyan University. ¿

The second in a series: the master filmmaker’s prose scenarios for four of his notable filmsOn the first day of editing Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog recalls, his editor said: “With this kind of material we have to pretend to invent cinema.” And this, Herzog says, is what he tries to do every day. In this second volume of his scenarios, the peerless filmmaker’s genius for invention is on clear display. Written in Herzog’s signature fashion—more prose poem than screenplay, transcribing the vision unfolding before him as if in a dream—the four scenarios here (three never before translated into English) reveal an iconoclastic craftsman at the height of his powers.Along with his template for the film poem Fata Morgana (1971), this volume includes the scenarios for Herzog’s first two feature films, Signs of Life (1968) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), along with the hypnotic Heart of Glass (1976). In a brief introduction, Herzog describes the circumstances surrounding each scenario, inviting readers into the mysterious process whereby one man’s vision becomes every viewer’s waking dream.

I do not follow ideas, I stumble into stories or into people; and I know that this is so big, I have to make a film. Very often, films come like uninvited guests, like burglars in the middle of the night. They are in your kitchen; something is stirring, you wake up at 3 a.m. and all of a sudden they come wildly swinging at you.When I write a screenplay, I write it as if I have the whole film in front of my eyes. Then it is very easy for me, and I can write very, very fast. It is almost like copying. But of course sometimes I push myself; I read myself into a frenzy of poetry, reading Chinese poets of the eighth and ninth century, reading old Icelandic poetry, reading some of the finest German poets like Hú6lderlin. All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of my film, but I work myself up into this kind of frenzy of high-caliber language and concepts and beauty.And then sometimes I push myself by playing music, for example, a piano concerto by Beethoven, and I play it and write furiously. But none of this is an answer to the question of how you focus on a single idea for a film. And then, during shooting, you have to depart from it sometimes, while keeping it alive in its essence. —Werner Herzog, on filmmakingWerner Herzog doesn''t write traditional screenplays. He writes fever dreams brimming with madness, greed, humor, and dark isolation that can shift dramatically during production—and have materialized into extraordinary masterpieces unlike anything in film today. Harnessing his vision and transcendent reality, these four pieces of long-form prose earmark a renowned filmmaker at the dawn of his career.